The Worst Thing Since Sliced Bread

I don't know how sliced bread was invented, by whom or when. I don't know which company first offered it to the consumer and I don't know which market first stocked it on the shelves. And I don't really care.

What I do care about is what sliced bread has come to represent, and that is ease and convenience in food. And I also care that it has become the "best thing" in our cultural cliches. It's time to modify our thinking and perspective to view something, like all you can eat soup, salad and breadsticks at Olive Garden, for example, as the worst thing since sliced bread.

But we don't have to go as far as AYCE offers at restaurants to develop a list of things as bad as sliced bread. All of the little things that we have come to enjoy as conveniences have made us lazy in our thinking about food, lazy in our consumption of food, and lazy...period. We are thoughtless with our purchases because food is so cheap. But that attitude sure has been expensive to our health, hasn't it? We buy and cook and gorge and do all of it without considering the consequences because there are so few consequences: replacing food is cheap and easy.

And I submit that this desire for sliced-bread-convenience has driven us into the piggish consumerism we're trying to wade out of now in the financial markets. What we wanted in our food - easy, quick, convenient and requiring no hard work and no thought - we came to want from our mortgages. In 2005, when I was shopping for a house and could show only a substitute teacher's salary, I was pre-approved for a nearly half-million dollar mortage. I raised alarm bells in a conversation with friends, but they didn't flinch. Why would they? Everything had (or should) become quick, easy, convenient, effortless, right? We wanted everything just like we want our bread.

Now we see that there are dangers to this kind of thinking. We "advanced" from sliced bread to fast food, and look where that's gotten us. We "advanced" from sliced bread to frozen dinners in family sized packages, and look where that's gotten us. We "advanced" from sliced bread to sugar-laded, pre-made and pre-packaged iced tea, and look where that's gotten us. (As an aside, it's tea bags and water, for *$!@ sake!!! How hard is it to make?!?!) We "advanced" from sliced bread to canned friuts and vegetables and herbs in squeeze tubes. We "advanced" from sliced bread to sliced deli meats. We "advanced" from sliced bread to processed cheese slices.

Yes, I realize that all of this cheap food means that fewer people go hungry. But I think that all of this cheap food has also cheapened us. We don't appreciate the planning and knowledge and skill and effort that goes into feeding our families for a week because everything is so cheap and easy, so we have taken it all for granted and become disgusting gluttons.

And if all this time we had been buying fresh-baked bread from the local baker or freshly harvested vegetables and butchered meats from the local farmer, our food would have been more expensive, yes, but our purchasing would have had to have been more conservative, and our eating habits would have naturally been moderated.

So the next time you see that something is so easy, so dangerously easy, think of it as the worst thing since sliced bread.